Too True to Be Good

Almost everyone has tried, at some point, to be good. Not good in the small sense of being polite, but good in the large sense the commandments seem to ask for. To love without resentment. To stop wanting what isn't yours. To forgive the person who has not earned it. To stop lying awake rearranging a future you cannot control. Most people try this sincerely, for a while, and then quietly discover they cannot do it. The wanting comes back. The resentment returns. The worry resumes its place at the foot of the bed.

The usual conclusion is that you have failed. That you were not disciplined enough, not faithful enough, not good enough. Two thousand years of Western religion have been very willing to confirm this conclusion. But there is an older reading, and it suggests the failure was the point.

I. The Impossible Demands

Read the Sermon on the Mount as a list of instructions and it becomes unlivable almost immediately. Love your enemies. Take no thought for tomorrow. If a man takes your coat, give him your cloak as well. Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect. No one has ever done these things. Every minister who has ever preached on "take no thought for the morrow" has, at some point, quietly set it aside as impractical, because of course you must think about tomorrow, you have children to feed.

Alan Watts noticed that the demands are not difficult but impossible, and that this is consistent enough to look deliberate.

You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say that whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Who has not? The demand cannot be met by anyone with a pulse. And then the instruction that follows is stranger still: if your eye offends you, pluck it out, for it is better to enter heaven with one eye than to be cast whole into hell. Taken as law, it is monstrous. Taken as something else, it begins to make sense. Watts thought the something else was humor, and that the theologians had simply missed the joke.

II. The Joke the Church Could Not Take

The clue is that the teacher does not keep his own commandment. He says that whoever calls his brother a fool is in danger of hellfire. Later, in the same gospel, addressing the crowd, he calls them fools to their faces. You fools and blind. He breaks his own rule in plain sight.

A rule that its own author violates is not a rule. It is a device. The Sermon on the Mount is built as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole project of becoming righteous by effort, by obeying harder, by white-knuckling the self into goodness. The demands are pitched exactly high enough that no amount of trying will reach them. You are meant to try. You are meant to fail. And in the failing, something is supposed to come loose.

Paul, writing to the Romans, says it almost outright. The law was not given in the expectation that it would be kept. I had not known sin, except the law had said, you shall not covet. The law was given to convict, to show you the size of the gap between what is asked and what you can do. The same logic runs under the commandments of Jesus. They were never a curriculum to be completed. They were a mirror held up to the self that thought it could complete them.

III. The Koan

This is an old technology, and it does not belong to Christianity alone. A Zen master hands a student a question with no answer. What is the sound of one hand clapping. Show me your original face, the one you had before your parents were born. The student does not solve these. The point is not to solve them. The point is to press the thinking, grasping, problem-solving self against something it cannot get hold of, again and again, until that self exhausts itself and falls away.

The student works at the koan the way a sincere believer works at the commandments. With everything they have. And the breakthrough, when it comes, is never the answer. It is the collapse of the one who was looking for the answer.

Watts saw the Sermon on the Mount as a koan pretending to be a law. Try to love perfectly. Try to take no thought for tomorrow. Try to want nothing that is not yours. You cannot. And the question that opens when you finally stop is not why am I such a failure, but who, exactly, was supposed to be doing all this? When you look for that separate self, the doer behind the deeds, you cannot find it either. That is the whole of it. That is what the impossible commandments were built to reveal.

IV. A Son of God

There is a translation that has carried more weight than almost any other, and it turns on a single word.

When the crowd takes up stones, the charge is blasphemy. You, being a man, make yourself God. And the answer comes back as a question, quoting their own scripture at them:

Is it not written in your law, I said, you are gods?

The line is from the eighty-second Psalm. You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High. He is not claiming something for himself that he denies to them. He is pointing at them. The word that the King James Bible renders as "the Son of God" is, in the Greek, "a son of God." The definite article was added later, in translation, and with it the whole architecture of exclusivity. In Hebrew and in Arabic, "son of" does not mean offspring. It means of the nature of. To call someone a son of a bitch is to say they are bitchy, not to comment on their mother. A son of God is one of the divine nature. He says, in effect, I am of the divine nature. So are you. You simply have not woken up to it.

Watts liked to point out that this recognition, which got a man killed in Jerusalem, would in India have been met with congratulations. Of course you are. We have been trying to tell you. The scandal was local. The recognition was not.

I and the Father are one.

Read through the added article, it is a unique and untouchable claim, a door open to exactly one person. Read as it stands in the Greek, it is an invitation, and the most dangerous sentence the institution would ever have to manage.

V. Too True to Be Good

What the church did with this, over the centuries that followed, was to keep the man and bury the instruction. He was placed on a pedestal high enough to admire and too high to follow. Only he was the way. Only he was the son of God, in the singular, capital-S sense. Not you. The recognition that was meant to spread like leaven through the whole lump was sealed inside a single historical figure and locked there.

Watts had a phrase for why. It was too true to be good. The teaching was accurate, and its accuracy was precisely the problem, because a population that took it seriously could not be governed by guilt. If you cannot keep the commandments, and you are told the commandments are the measure of your worth, then you live in permanent debt to the institution that holds the ledger. But if the commandments were never meant to be kept, if they were a koan all along, then the ledger closes. The guilt has nowhere to stand.

This is the same move the Buddha made when he turned away from miracles and refused to be worshipped, and the same one Jesus made when he tried to wave off the disciples who wanted to fall down before him. Why do you call me good? There is none good but God. He kept trying to turn them from the worship of a person back toward the recognition in themselves. They kept building a religion anyway. It is what frightened people do with a teacher they cannot follow. They make a god of him so they will not have to become one.

VI. Take No Thought for the Morrow

There is one demand in the list that reads differently once the rest have done their work.

Behold the birds of the heaven. They sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin.

Taken as instruction, it is the one everyone abandons. You cannot actually stop providing for tomorrow. But it was never asking you to stop planning. It was describing a way of being present that does not leak away into an imagined future. The birds are not careless. They are simply here. The whole anxious machinery of holding on, of securing what is yours against a tomorrow that has not arrived, is a way of being absent from the only place anything is ever actually happening.

The sin the demand points at is not poor planning. It is absence. Not being here. And the cure is not better discipline but the same letting go the koan was always pointing toward, the loosening of the grip of the self that believes it must hold the whole future in its two hands or be crushed. The grain of wheat, the teacher says elsewhere, must fall into the ground and die, or it remains alone. Hold on and you stay isolated. Let go and you bring forth much.

VII. The Same Voice

The traditions that pushed this far did not borrow it from each other. The Upanishads arrived at it in their own language, with no church to bury it: Tat Tvam Asi. That thou art. The thing you are looking for is the thing that is looking. Ibn Arabi arrived at it as al-Insan al-Kamil, the realized human in whom the divine is fully at home. The Tao arrived at it without ever personifying it at all, in the watercourse way that yields and so overcomes. None of them needed the others. They kept finding the same ground because the ground was always there to be found.

What Jesus did was find it inside the one tradition least equipped to let him say it plainly. He had only the vocabulary of a jealous and singular God, a vocabulary built for a kingdom with a throne at the top. To say in that language "I am of the divine nature, and so are you" was to invite either a crown or a cross. He refused the crown. The cross is what was left.

The koan and the commandment, it turns out, are the same instrument pointed from two directions. One asks an impossible question. The other gives an impossible command. Both are built to exhaust the self that thinks it can answer, that thinks it can comply, until the self that was trying quietly stops, and finds there was no one there to try.

You were never going to be good enough. That was the design.

This dispatch has a companion. Dispatch 10: The Cosmic Giggle follows the same divine humor — from the laugh that arrives at the worst possible moment, up through the dancing Shiva, to the Buddha's half-smile.